A crisis is one of the best opportunities because worried people are apt to fall for weak arguments and let the politicians have their way. Now, to work this way, the crisis doesn’t even have to be real. Here’s an example: the supposed student loan crisis.

It’s a bit alarming that such prominent politicians as Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel and Tennessee’s governor Bill Haslam would try to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes with the notion that government can make any good or service free.

Not long after the Fisher decision was released, Gallup published an interesting poll on the subject of racial preferences. The remarkable thing about the poll was that it showed widespread opposition to allowing colleges to base admissions decisions on race.

Arbitrarily raising the compensation for adjuncts to a “living wage” level not only imposes unnecessary costs on other parties, but interferes with the market’s implicit message to prospective professors: “This field is full, so if you want a prosperous career, you’d better look elsewhere.”

The solution is not to terminate any accreditors or to wipe out schools where many of the students drop out or have trouble after graduating. The solution is to stop subsidizing weak and disengaged students to go to college.

Demand for “fair lending” ironically limits access to credit for smart and ambitious students who don’t come from wealthy families. An unconstrained market would do the most to allocate scarce funds to needy students who’ll put them to good use.

The problem is that the lack of a college degree now operates against people just as the lack of a high school diploma did in Griggs. People are shut out of many jobs not because they lack ability but just because they lack educational credentials.